


Hanahaki

by weirdmilk



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Major Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-17 00:26:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14176599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirdmilk/pseuds/weirdmilk
Summary: Oikawa is afflicted with Hanahaki disease - an illness borne of love believed to be unrequited - that causes him to cough up bright blue flowers.‘What’s in your hand?’ Iwaizumi’s voice trembles like a violin string. He already knows.





	Hanahaki

It starts slow - a tickle, pain in his chest when he overworks himself during practice. Afterwards, he’ll find himself sitting on the bench in the club room, breathing hard and heavy, a sharpness brushing silkily against his throat. The sensation makes him quiet and still. Out of the corner of his eye, Iwaizumi watches him with mute, blunt concern. Oikawa ignores the pain and Iwaizumi, too; he pull on his shirt, leaves without saying goodbye. Breathes the fresh air. The prickle in his lungs recedes. His shoulders slump, only partly in relief.

It starts slow, but progresses suddenly. It’s been a few weeks of the cough, the metal taste in his throat. It's been easy enough to ignore, but now - Oikawa is in the club room - his chest always feels so heavy, in the club room, now. He’s listening to Iwaizumi. He’s listening to the voice, rather than the words; it’s deep and low, with a softness that means he’s tired. He’ll go home after this and eat cup noodle, probably - or something sweet, maybe; a burst of sugary electricity, to get him through the evening.

The heaviness in his chest feels as though it's spreading. The prickle feels more like scratching, against his ribs - as though an animal is inside him, scrabbling. He thinks: am I going to pass out? He stands up unsteadily. It’s better to be standing, to meet things head on. He coughs, once, a test - and feels a wetness on his lips. He coughs again - an answer - and feels something in his mouth. He reaches up with a shaking hand, pulls it out. He stares at it, disbelieving and afraid. A petal: blue, and small, and dotted prettily with spots of his own blood.

He stands there, smelling sweat and bodies and body spray. He stares down at his own hand, holding the sweet-smelling token. A bead of blood falls from his lip onto the petal. He thinks of nothing - nothing at all.

He doesn’t notice Iwaizumi’s hands guiding him back to the bench, but he notices when they leave his shoulders. He’s still holding the blood-covered petal, but his fist has closed around it. They are, Oikawa realises, the only ones in the room. Iwaizumi had shouted until everyone left. His voice had been frail, underneath its brutishness. Oikawa closes his eyes, and leans back against the wall.

‘Hey,’ Iwaizumi says roughly, shaking him. ‘Don’t sleep.’

‘Tired,’ Oikawa tells him, but keeps his eyes open.

‘What’s in your hand?’ Iwaizumi’s voice trembles like a violin string. He already knows. 

Oikawa thinks: he will find out soon enough. He unfurls his hand. Iwaizumi steps back, automatic horror compelling his body to retreat. It’s squeezed thin, but the little blue item in his hand is still, clearly, a bloody petal. It’s still, clearly, a symptom. It's a fact. 

Iwaizumi opens and closes his mouth several times. Oikawa can see his tongue, his bloodless tongue. There are no flowers in his mouth, just sharp, white teeth. Oikawa thinks about his own mouth, the front line of a battle he's never going to win. The blood has dripped down onto his clean, white shirt. Everyone will know, when they see him. Iwaizumi puts his hand back on Oikawa’s shoulder - heavy and good. A weight.

 

* * *

 

 

‘Hanahaki disease,’ the doctor says. It isn’t a surprise, but the confirmation lands like a stone. ‘Very rare in someone your age. Do you know what that means, for you?

‘I don’t know,’ Oikawa says.

‘Well,’ the doctor begins, with a deep breath, as though she doesn’t want to be having the conversation either, ‘it’s a psychosomatic illness. It’s associated with unrequited love, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s more accurate to associate the illness with a love that's _unfulfilled_ ; the belief that it’s unrequited. The pining; the pain. It can spontaneously go into remission, but it can - fester. It can be fatal, if left untreated.’

‘Treatment?' Oikawa echoes, numb.

‘You can wait and see if it clears up,’ the doctor says, although she sounds doubtful. ‘But at your age...' She cuts herself off. 'You can get the flowers pruned, if you don’t want a full flosectomy. But if they don’t clear up - that’s the only option.’

‘Why can’t I just get them out now?’

She smiles again - shadowy. ‘The removal of the flowers also removes any emotion you feel towards the person.’

Oikawa says, quiet and certain, ‘I can’t do that.’ He takes a deep breath. He feels the petals shiver inside him. ‘How long, before I have to…’

‘Before you have to decide?’ the doctor asks, small, grim smile still on her mouth. It’s not really a question. ‘Not long. Weeks.’

‘What can I do,’ Oikawa mumbles, and he’s not sure who he’s talking to, or what he’s talking about. ‘What can I do - what can I -’

The doctor watches him. She has a distant, maternal expression. ‘It’s unusual for your age, she repeats. ‘How long - the person?’

‘All my life,’ Oikawa replies - graceful in the face of the truth of it, and he has no reason to lie to her. Her face closes like curtains.

‘Consider the removal, in that case,’ is all she says before bidding him goodbye, and sending him home, a prescription for floral growth suppressant in the same hand that had held the petal.  


* * *

 

 

The suppressant, Oikawa supposes, is good. It must be good, because he doesn’t cough up any more petals for three days. This time, it happens at Iwaizumi’s house. He feels drowsy and impermanent before it happens: a muted, watercolour painting. The heaviness in his chest is worse than it had been in the club room, the first time. It feels as though his lungs are filling with water, rather than flowers. There is such weight to them.

He has enough time to say, ‘Iwa-chan -’ before his lungs revolt, and he starts the hacking, wheezing, desperate coughs. He’s on his knees, on Iwaizumi’s bedroom floor. He closes his eyes to block out the brittle horror of it all, but it doesn’t stop. He coughs, and coughs, and coughs, his throat fluttering in anguish against the assault - he feels the blood, and tastes the flowers. He feels the petals filling his mouth. There’s more than before. He spits them out into his hand, along with the blood. There’s more blood, too, and it’s darker.

He feels sick, and faint. Iwaizumi is on the floor next to him, his hand back on his shoulder, as though it’s the only place he can touch.

Oikawa’s hand is full of blood and wet, sweet petals. He gasps in as much as air as he can fit into his overcrowded lungs, but he can still taste the organic flavours coating his tongue.

‘Who is it?’ Iwaizumi asks him, urgently, and their faces are very close, ‘Oikawa - who -’

‘You know who it is,’ Oikawa says, and spits another pretty blue petal into his hand. ‘You know -’

‘Please,’ Iwaizumi begs, face crumpling like a brown paper bag, ‘get the surgery  - it’s -’

‘I can’t,’ Oikawa says, blood and anger mixing inside his mouth, ‘don’t ever tell me to do that -’ He stands up on colt-like legs.

Iwaizumi lets out a hopeless sound, something like a shout and something like a sob, and leans down to wipe his eyes on his sleeve.

Oikawa flushes the petals down the toilet, watching the water turn red, and the flowers revert to a holy, innocent blue. He washes his hands - the water red, again, and his hands clean: non-incriminating, for now. He slumps down against the wall, head leans back. He doesn’t turn the tap off - he lets the gentle, river-like sound wash through him until he feels stronger. He doesn’t return to Iwaizumi’s room to say goodbye - he leaves without looking back.

The flowers come faster and harder, after the episode in Iwaizumi’s room. He wakes up in the night, choking on stamens, leaves, lively yellow pollen. He takes the pills, but they don’t seem to be suppressing anything. School has become an exercise in survival. Practice has him on the bench, daily, a box of tissues next to him. His breath comes fast and shallow and unsatisfying. The flowers are growing, desperate and needy - he feels them brush against his airway. They want to see the sun; they are so tired of the spongy darkness.

The more flowers he grows, the more Oikawa feels a calm fatalism. He knows he’ll die with the blue spilling from his mouth. There’s no other option: surgical removal would mean the removal of his deepest self. It would be a suicide, but he’d die years later, empty and alone. At least now he can die filled with love, filled with flowers. He doesn't have to die a liar. 

It happens as he sits on the bench, eyes trained on his team, but thoughts turned inwards. The heaviness has a new quality to it: real, sharp pain, rather than a weight. Breathing hurts, and then it stops hurting, because it’s impossible to breathe at all. The flowers spill from his mouth, whole and blue and beautiful. He closes his eyes. He feels the blood spread across the bench and touch his cheek - gently, like a lover might.

He hears a faint scream. He doesn’t know who made the sound, but seconds later he recognises the rough hands cradling his face, and he thinks: how lovely, to die like this, in his hands.

* * *

 

He doesn’t die like that. He doesn’t die at all. He wakes in a hospital room, sterile and gracious. There are no flowers on his bedside table. Breathing comes more easily. He opens his eyes to the same doctor he spoke to weeks before.

‘You should have been more careful,’ she says. ‘You could have died. Your options -’

‘There aren’t any,’ Oikawa tells her, as though he’s the doctor and she’s the patient. ‘No options.’

She shakes her head.‘So young -’ She says, ‘I’m going to schedule you for surgery next week. You can cancel, but I would recommend that you don’t.’

He has to stay in hospital, the nurses tell him. They fluff his pillows, and touch his forehead. He leans into their careful, gentle touches. Their hands are soft and warm. They aren't the rough hands he wants. The chasm has opened; he can’t hold back the blue. He coughs into basins, into his own sleeve, into cardboard bowls. It happens so often now that there’s no point in marking the episodes. It’s one, long, blue moment. His mother cries. His father breaks a cup, as he drinks coffee by the door in hands that don't understand.

He hears voices outside his door.

‘Get out of the way. I need to see him.’ Iwaizumi’s voice is strained.

‘You’re going to kill him.’ That’s Hanamaki.

‘Don’t you ever - I would never -’ His voice breaks before he can get the words out. Does he think he’s lying? Does he believe it?

‘You already have.’ Matsukawa. He hears a loud, anguished yell. It’s Iwaizumi. Oikawa thinks he should be more quiet; this is a hospital, after all.

There’s a thud, and Iwaizumi enters, breathing fast and hard, but easy. His chest moves so fluidly. There’s nothing growing inside him. He’s healthy and vital. He will live to be eighty years old, and he will marry a beautiful woman, and have beautiful children, and he will grow flowers in a garden, rather than his own God-damned lungs.

There’s nothing to say. Oikawa has nothing to say. The flowers are crowding at his throat again. There's so much to say. 

‘Oikawa,’ Iwaizumi says, then, ‘Tooru.’

Oikawa points at his throat in lieu of speech.

‘You can’t speak?’ Iwaizumi asks, eyes huge and afraid. Oikawa shakes his head. ‘What’s going to happen?’

Oikawa smiles at him. He takes his finger and pulls it across his neck. If he were to use a knife - to slice at his white throat, then the flowers would spring from the gash, into the air, into being. It would be a beautiful reckoning. 

Iwaizumi shakes his head, but it’s not a denial: it’s just an expression of disbelief, of horror. ‘Please,’ he begs, ‘please, Tooru.’

Oikawa smiles at him again, and shakes his head. His chest constricts. He holds up a hand, so he can cough the blooms up. When he stops, when the flowers are in front of him in a bloody pulp, he finds that the pressure at his throat has eased a little. He says, ‘No.’

Iwaizumi wheels him out to the courtyard. The wheelchair is strong and silver. The cherry blossoms wink and dance at them. He feels tired and old. He’s eighteen. So young, the doctor had said, so young. He had never learned her name.

The blossoms are falling onto his head. He raises a hand, curious to touch the flowers that haven’t been inside him. They land prettily on his hand, like a butterfly. He feels them fall into his hair. He feels peace, here, in the garden. Soon he’ll be nothing but little blue flowers, and he’ll belong here, with the blossoms. He closes his eyes. He enjoys the gentle flowers against his face: he is moved by them. 

Iwaizumi is watching him, and there’s something on his face that is bright and sudden. It’s the expression he gets when he hits a perfect spike. When he gets full marks on a quiz he thought he’d failed. And now, it's here, watching Oikawa being showered in soft, pink petals, while his lungs gently grow their blue poison.

Oikawa meets his eyes. Iwaizumi’s eyes are spilling over, but his own are dry. Iwaizumi says, ‘Tooru, I -’

The pressure is back, so Oikawa doesn’t answer, just gazes hazily at him through the pink.

Iwaizumi clutches at his own throat. He takes a gasping breath. He coughs, just once. He glances across at Oikawa, and there’s a terrible fear in his eyes. He says, ‘Tooru, I think -’

He is cut off by another cough, and it sounds deeper. From low inside his body, where the light doesn’t get in and it’s dark and damp and forsaken. Iwaizumi covers his mouth with his rough hand. He pales at what he sees on his palm. 

Iwaizumi coughs - the third time. This time, it’s a sound Oikawa’s horribly familiar with: hacking and all-consuming. He collapses onto the ground. Oikawa wants to scream, but he an only watch as Iwaizumi coughs and heaves on his knees. He watches as something long, and green (and red, so much red) lands on the ground, on top of the pink. Iwaizumi drops his head; some of his hair touches the ground. Some of his 

It’s flowers. It’s so many flowers. More flowers than he’s ever seen. Iwaizumi falls backwards, so that he’s sitting rather than kneeling. His eyes are streaming; blood drips from his open mouth.

Iwaizumi says, ‘I think -’ He coughs again, but less violently. He spits out one green petal. He laughs, without warning, but it sounds like the blood on the ground. ‘Oikawa. Look. Just look at me.' 

Oikawa is shaking inside his chair. Iwaizumi stares up at him from the ground. There’s no smile. It’s just seriousness, on every cell. The blood keeps dripping. The flowers are at his feet. Tiny and green - so many, so many. He looks shocked to his bones. To his lungs. He says again, ‘Look at me. Please. Look. Can't you see it?’

Iwaizumi asks him to look, so Oikawa looks. He can’t deny Iwaizumi anything, even if it kills him. Iwaizumi’s eyes are huge and alive. His face has split open, chasmically: he’s smiling, wide and manic with the first glow of understanding, the unburdening and the becoming. Oikawa feels blood in his throat again, but it tastes different - it tastes like stale ash, like a burnt forest. He gasps. His lungs are alive with it: he feels a terrible movement. The flowers. They’re wilting. He can’t stop taking in huge gasps of air. Every breath he takes, the flowers quiver more violently inside him - threatened, frightened motions.

He finds he can speak - the pressure at his throat is gone, replaced by little earthquake tremors. ‘You mean -’

‘Yeah,’ Iwaizumi says. He hasn’t wiped the blood away. He’s left it on his mouth like a token - like proof.

‘Come here,’ Oikawa says. He’s hoarse and his voice is trembling like a leaf in the breeze.

Iwaizumi is shaking too hard to stand, but he crawls over to Oikawa. Oikawa gazes at the blood on Iwaizumi’s mouth, still fresh and wet. Iwaizumi sits at Oikawa’s feet: an offering and a promise and an apology, and so many things at once. Oikawa takes his hand and with draws one finger through the blood on Iwaizumi’s mouth, smearing it over his jaw, his cheeks. Oikawa gazes at the redness on his fingertip. He touches it to his own mouth - pale, chapped. He lets it mingle with the blood that’s always inside his own mouth, these days.

His throat constricts and he gasps. His mouth fills with ash. He coughs; it spills over his lap. It’s a nothingness grey, but in the powders he can see parts of blue petals, a little piece of green leaf. He feels as light as the air flooding into him. His chest is full of love, but the good kind of love - that floats, rather than weighs.

Iwaizumi touches the blood on his mouth with his own finger. He says, ‘Sorry I'm late.’

Oikawa’s mouth tastes fresh and bloodless. He holds out his hand. Iwaizumi knocks it away and stands up to kiss him, instead.   


**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the weirdest thing I've ever written. I don't enjoy fantasy elements! But here we are :p 
> 
> fwiw: i had in in my mind that oikawa coughs up forget-me-nots, which symbolise true love, and iwaizumi coughs up ragweed/ambrosia, which symbolises a love being returned
> 
> hanahaki disease isn't my own creation; i only heard of it yesterday (it's a fanfiction trope that started in k-pop fic? apparently?)
> 
>  
> 
> [weirdmilk @ tumblr](http://www.weirdmilk.tumblr.com)


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